Voters uphold groundbreaking Washington state climate law

By Rachel Frazin, The Hill, Nov. 6, 2024

Voters in Washington state on Tuesday night upheld a groundbreaking climate law despite opposition from conservatives.

The Associated Press projected that a ballot initiative seeking to repeal the law has failed. 

The law in question sets a cap on major polluters’ greenhouse gas emissions. Under the law, those companies are required to either bring their emissions down below a certain threshold or pay to purchase allowances.

The money from those allowances, which will become more scarce over time, goes toward funding climate-friendly projects including purchasing electric school buses and electric vehicle charging stations.

Opposition to the initiative came from a group called “Let’s Go Washington” which described the law as a “hidden gas tax.” The group is funded by Brian Heywood, who the AP described as a hedge fund executive. 

Advocacy groups cheered the ballot initiative’s failure, describing it as a significant win for climate change.

“The defeat of Initiative 2117 is a major victory for bold state-level climate action and a decisive affirmation of [Washington Gov. Jay] Inslee’s popular policies that made Washington a national leader on climate change,” said a statement from Justin Balik, senior state program director at Evergreen Action, a group that was founded by former Inslee staffers. 

Canada’s carbon tax is popular, innovative and helps save the planet – but now it faces the axe

As prime minister Justin Trudeau trails in polls, opposition seek to persuade voters environmental policy is a burden

The situation in Canada, described in Leyland Secco’s story in The Guardian, demonstrates why carbon pricing must be both well communicated and bipartisan.

By Leyland Cecco, The Guardian, Oct. 5, 2024

Mass hunger and malnutrition. A looming nuclear winter. An existential threat to the Canadian way of life. For months, the country’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has issued dire and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about the future. The culprit? A federal carbon levy meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In the House of Commons this month, the Tory leader said there was only one way to avoid the devastating crisis: embattled prime minister Justin Trudeau must “call a ‘carbon tax’ election”.

Hailed as a global model of progressive environmental policy, Canada’s carbon tax has reduced emissions and put money in the pockets of Canadians. The levy, endorsed by conservative and progressive economists, has survived multiple federal elections and a supreme court challenge. But this time, a persistent cost-of-living crisis and a pugnacious Conservative leader running on a populist message have thrust the country’s carbon tax once more into the spotlight, calling into question whether it will survive another national vote.

In 2018, Trudeau announced plans for the “pan-Canadian climate framework”, modelled after British Columbia’s pioneering carbon tax. Notably, the levy is revenue neutral: the government doesn’t keep any money. Instead, it remits all of it back to taxpayers in the form a quarterly rebate. Any increase in costs from a tax on fuel is offset by a rebate of roughly equal value.

According to the federal government, a family of four in Ontario will receive C$1,120 (£630) this year in rebates. Those living in a rural community receive C$1,344. A rural family of four in the province of Alberta receives C$2,160.

Anyone willing and able to change their behaviour would end up in the black. Economists, political scientists – and the parliamentary budget officer – have found low-income households receive more from the rebate than they pay in additional costs. But the Conservatives, with a significant lead in the polls, are keen to capture mounting frustration with the incumbent government and transform a federal vote into a referendum on Trudeau’s marquee climate policy. Their campaign message, on billboards and T-shirts, has been simple: “axe the tax”. They argue that levy burdens Canadians at a time when rents, groceries and transportation costs have all surged.

Kathryn Harrison, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, who has spent years studying the effects of carbon levies on behaviour and emissions, laments the “outright falsehoods” peddled for political benefit.

“The current political discourse means a lot of Canadians misunderstand how the policy affects them. They don’t think it works. They think they’re paying more than they are. And that’s a very distressing thing for me, from not just a climate policy perspective, but a democratic perspective,” she said. “This isn’t a debate about how much emphasis to put on one issue or another. The unpopularity of the carbon tax is, to a large degree, driven by voters misunderstanding it and having the facts wrong.”

For Canada’s environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, the fractious debate represents a crossroads for the country in addressing the effects of the climate crisis.

“The reality is, it’s easy to say ‘axe the tax’,” he said. “No one likes to pay taxes. It is more complicated to explain that climate change is real, it’s costing Canadians billions of dollars and carbon pricing is one of many measures we’re putting in place to try and fight climate change. That’s harder to communicate than a slogan.”

But the tenor of the debate – and the misinformation – also suggests something deeper is at stake.

“Climate, and more generally, the environment is now caught into this culture war where facts don’t matter, where the truth has no currency,” said Guilbeault. “This is an issue that speaks to the fundamental elements of our democracies around the world, many of which are being weakened by those campaigns of disinformation.”

Still, the perceived benefits of abandoning the tax have lured in other party leaders. Last month, the New Democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh suggested his support was waning because he doesn’t want a policy that puts the “burden on the backs of working people” – a claim dismissed by experts.

“It is surprising the federal NDP are turning their back on a very progressive policy that both reduces carbon pollution, but also delivers rebates greater than carbon payments for lower income households – the people he purports to be most supportive of,” said Harrison.

Guilbeault admits federal government was “a bit slow” in course-correcting the waves of misinformation surrounding the levy.

“We could have done better, but the 2019 and 2021, and partially, the 2015 elections were fought in part on the issue of carbon pricing – and we won those elections,” he said. “

Initially, the tax was remitted in the form of a tax cut that few people noticed when they filed their taxes. Later, the government began directly depositing the money – but couldn’t get the banks to indicate the money was a rebate from the carbon tax. It took a change to the law that finally compelled banks to label government payments as the “Canada Carbon Rebate” or “CdaCarbonRebate”.

As nations around the world unveil politics to blunt the effects of a rapidly changing climate, recent report from the Canadian Climate Institute found the national carbon levy, which targets both consumers and industry, is projected to reduce emissions by as much as 50% by 2030.

In the event that a Conservative government abandons the national carbon levy, Canada will have “no way” of meeting its 2030 emissions targets,” said Guilbeault, adding it “reduces our credibility” when negotiating with other nations moving ahead with plans to lower emissions.

Most of the debate right now is on the fuel charge the consumer-facing carbon price, with little focus on the industrial carbon tax, said Dale Beugin, vice-president of the Canadian Climate Institute, which “delivers three times the emissions reductions by 2030” than the consumer component of the tax.

Opposition party leaders, including Singh, have vaguely suggested strengthening the industrial part of the carbon tax to make up for the lost benefits of the consumer tax.

“But the reality is, when you remove one policy – in this case, the consumer carbon tax – you’re forced to pushing harder on other levers to go after emissions,” said Beugin. “And there aren’t many sources – buildings, vehicles – that haven’t been looked at yet.”

For Beugin, the debate underscores an uncomfortable reality about policies meant to unwind the sustained environmental damage from unfettered emissions.

“Climate policy isn’t easy. It requires some effort to push against the things that are easy and simple politically, because that’s this transformation that we need,” he said. “Yes, technology is getting cheaper, but climate policy is inevitably hard – and you don’t want to shy away from that.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/05/canadas-carbon-tax-is-popular-innovative-and-helps-save-the-planet-but-now-it-faces-the-axe

What Happens if China Stops Trying to Save the World?

Column by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, Sept. 16, 2024

In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate.

Take China out of these figures and the numbers look much less impressive: 90 gigawatts installed in 2019, 93 in 2020, 100 in 2021, 133 in 2022 and 162 in 2023. There has been progress outside of China — a 62 percent increase in new capacity between 2021 and 2023. But in China the increase was 317 percent.

The pattern extends beyond solar. According to one recent estimate, nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China, which is deploying green energy at more than eight times the scale of any other country in the world. Together, all the Group of 7 powers — the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain — managed barely one-quarter as many new installations in 2023 as did China. In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6. In 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world and 1.4 million in America.

There are encouraging stories elsewhere, to be sure. (In the first six months of 2024, Europe produced more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels, for instance, and rooftop solar increased by 349 percent in South Africa in just over a year.) But to the extent that the rest of the world is decarbonizing, China is helping power those transitions, too. In 2022, roughly 90 percent of the solar wafers and solar cells produced in the world were Chinese — by some measures more than twice as many as the rest of the world was even ready to install. Last year, more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines were manufactured in China and 60 percent of the world’s E.V. sales came from China. In 2004, the American share of global solar manufacturing was 13 percent, but by 2023, it had fallen below 1 percent. China’s share is now 80 percent; it had been just 1 percent.

Just five years ago, it was commonplace to hear Western climate diplomats complain that even the most miraculous decarbonization in the wealthy world would be worth little if the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose country single-handedly produces nearly a third of all emissions, didn’t play ball. Even today, you hear nominally climate-conscious people lament the fact that warming is a worldwide problem with domestic solutions, postulating that the mismatch of local costs and global benefits will disincentivize bad or reluctant climate actors, and sometimes arguing that these dynamics suggest we should slow our roll, as well.

In fact, the competitive logic is now something like the opposite. By some measures, our peer countries and natural allies in Europe are all considerably farther along in their transitions than the United States. And our major geopolitical and geoeconomic rival is not slow-walking its decarbonization, but somewhat leaving the rest of the world in the dust. That doesn’t mean China has solved the world’s climate problem for us — or even its own, given the scale of its ongoing carbon emissions — just that “there is not one single energy transition but a series of regional transitions of widely varying form, pace and scope,” as Brett Christophers argued recently in The Financial Times. “There is an obfuscation involved in talking about ‘the global,’” Adam Tooze has written, “when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.”

A decade ago, an awful lot of intellectual and diplomatic energy was spent on the strategic question of how the United States and its allies might encourage China, then as now the world’s biggest emitter, to join us in the race to decarbonize. Today, U.S. policymakers are throwing up green-tech tariffs to protect American clean-energy industries — a sign that, measuring by price point, we are already losing that race, in addition to losing it as measured by rate of deployment.

China’s massive investments in green tech are both strategic stimulus for a flagging economy in the aftermath of a real-estate bubble and an imperial-scale bet on the importance of clean energy to prosperity and power in the 21st century. A similar logic guides green investment elsewhere, including in the United States, where the Inflation Reduction Act has been called “the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies.” But if this is a race, China has a commanding lead.

To measure instead by emissions, of course, yields a somewhat different picture. China today produces almost three times as much carbon as the United States, which is the world’s second-worst climate polluter, and towers even more dramatically above the other countries of the world in any tally of present-day damage to the future climate of the planet. But in certain ways this makes China’s green boom even more impressive: The most carbon-hungry economy in world history, during a period of slowing growth short of global “high-income” status, is wagering an enormous amount of its future on nascent energy technologies— and racing well ahead of the global promises it has made about the speed of its own transition. This year, for instance, China hit its 2030 target for total renewable energy six full years early. In the United States, we seem perhaps more focused on artificial intelligence.

You can measure the staggering impact in several ways. Electricity is the currency of the global transition, so to speak, and, last year, the total net growth in global electricity demand was 627 terawatt hours, according to Ember; China on its own added 606 terawatt hours. (A terawatt is one trillion watts.)

Or you can look at what the International Energy Agency calls “avoided emissions” — one way of measuring the impact of new renewables. New solar additions in China accounted for 619 megatons of annual avoided emissions, six times as much as the United States.

These gains partly reflect how dirty China’s legacy energy mix is, of course, since replacing coal reduces more emissions than replacing gas. Nevertheless the contrasts are eye-popping. New wind capacity built in China “avoided” 487 megatons of emissions, according to the I.E.A., while all the wind power elsewhere in the world only cut carbon by 343 megatons. In China, electric cars averted 22 megatons of emissions, more than in the United States (15 megatons), the European Union (14 megatons), Britain (3 megatons) and three times as much as new E.V.s in the rest of the world (7 megatons). Nuclear is a slightly more even race, but even there China avoided more emissions (74 megatons) than South Korea (20 megatons), the United Arab Emirates (15 megatons), the European Union (9 megatons) and the rest of the world (44 megatons).

You can also look at the simple scale of what they are building. China has devoted more than twice as much land to solar plants as the United States has.

What does all this add up to? What does it mean to place China at the incontrovertible center of any story about, or analysis of, the green transition?

The question is an enormous one, perhaps as large as geopolitics and as capacious as the scope of possible global futures. But in the short run, at least, two basic points stand out to me.

The first is that the energy transition is, at present, to a large degree, a Chinese project. There is progress being made around the world, but the gap between China and everybody else is much larger and more intimidating than is widely acknowledged, and the global story looks much less optimistic once you set China aside — which is, in some ways, precisely what America is trying to do by engaging in a green-tech trade war.

Much of the argument for those tariffs has concerned the challenge of Chinese subsidy and “overcapacity” — and what the United States and its allies might do, if anything, to enable us to properly compete with a green economy producing today twice as many solar panels as the world has demand for, as well as an E.V. company taking over the world while mostly posting losses. But another aspect of the imbalance is perhaps more worrying, at least for those of us concerned about the pace of decarbonization: that China might back off, reducing its support for green industry in much the way that it purposefully deflated its own real-estate bubble, somewhat idling the engine of the global green transition and leaving the rest of us in the lurch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/opinion/china-solar-climate.html

Insect-borne illnesses rise around the world

By Tina Reed and Alison Snyder, Axios, Aug. 29, 2024

Almost daily headlines about the spread of rare, potentially deadly insect-borne diseases like eastern equine encephalitis and Oropouche fever highlight the expanding threat that mosquitoes, ticks, and other bugs present.

Why it matters: Longer, hotter, summers, milder winters, and changes in land use and travel are giving insects more time and space to spread diseases or compound the misery in places where they already exist.

  • Global warming is "changing where mosquitoes and ticks live, and thus what diseases are moving around in different regions," CDC director Mandy Cohen said Wednesday.

Driving the news: The death of a New Hampshire resident from eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE, brought home the threat.

  • The CDC has also warned this summer about an increased risk of dengue fever, which is spread by the same type of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus and chikungunya.

  • West Nile Virus which was recently blamed for the hospitalization of former NIAID director Anthony Fauci — has become a perennial threat throughout much of the continental U.S.

  • Malaria, a parasite spread by another species of mosquito, is also on the rise around the world, and several cases were reported in the U.S. last year, though the risk of catching it here remains low.

Zoom in: In the U.S. in particular, experts say the environment for insects has become far more hospitable with temperatures rising further north.

  • "We're seeing diseases that used to be "tropical." Well, now parts of the U.S. can count," Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, told Axios.

  • "Ticks are not dying over the winter because it's not getting cold enough, so it's making Lyme disease spread. And then we're seeing other tick-borne diseases, like Powassan virus, start to spread. It is a predictable but potentially deadly consequence of climate change."

Yes, but: More travel and globalization are key elements that fuel the spread of vector-borne diseases, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

  • For example, researchers believe Oropouche fever, which is spread by mosquitoes and midges, was brought to the U.S. and Europe by travelers who had been to Cuba and South America. Officials do not have evidence of local transmission in the U.S.

  • A proliferation of trash — used tires and old plastic — can also create perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes, Osterholm said.

  • Changes in land use also play a role. Lyme disease is believed to be spreading in North America, in large part, due to the suppression of wildfires, which has allowed for the maturation of forests and animals that allow ticks to thrive.

Between the lines: Around the world, there are more — and more severe — outbreaks of arboviruses, which can be spread to people when infected insects bite them. "We're putting out more fires, and it takes more to put them out," says Colin Carlson of the Yale University School of Public Health.

  • The rise in malaria in Africa and dengue fever in Asia and the Americas have been linked to global warming but it's harder to attribute individual outbreaks or rare diseases to climate change, in part because of limited data, he said.

  • "It's also important to remember that explosive epidemics of arboviruses are standard fare," says Carlson, who studies whether changes in certain diseases can be linked to climate change. It happened with Zika and chikungunya in the Americas.

  • "With both Oropouche and EEE, I think it's important to not jump the gun and immediately go to, well, this is climate change in practice," Carlson says.

  1. The intrigue: Some mosquito species are migrating around the world — presumably being transported on shipping routes, says Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida.

    • One concern is a mosquito species could be deposited in a habitat that suits them and has "blood meals running around on the streets," Ryan said. If there's a disease there, the new species could pick it up and become part of the transmission cycle, she says.

    • "These are new paradigms," she adds. There's natural invasion biology happening at the same time as transformations in the landscape and climate change.

    • The challenge is "not even detecting it where it already exists. It's anticipating where it's coming to next."

  2. What to watch: Insect immunology could offer new avenues for fighting the diseases and is beginning to mature as a field, says microbiologist and National Science Foundation program director Joanna Shisler.

    • Insects don't have complex immune systems like humans but they have something akin to white blood cells and other immune cells.

    • By studying how a virus replicates in a mosquito and how the insect's immune system fights it, scientists may be able to understand why some mosquitoes are resistant while others are susceptible to different types of virus infections, Shisler says.

https://www.axios.com/2024/08/29/mosquitoes-ticks-diseases-climate-change?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosgenerate&stream=top

Another Outer Banks Home Collapses Into Ocean, a Stark Reminder of Climate Change

In Rodanthe, N.C., seven homes have been lost to the ocean in the last four years, as rising sea levels erode shorelines and put more buildings at risk.

By Kate Selig, The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2024

In the community of Rodanthe on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, residents witnessed on Friday an event that was not new and is unfortunately becoming more frequent: A house on the picturesque shoreline collapsed into the ocean.

Weather experts said that crashing waves produced by Hurricane Ernesto hundreds of miles away, combined with especially high tides, appeared to be the cause, though local officials also said that the house was at risk of collapsing before the storm. For those on the Outer Banks, the destruction was one more stark reminder of the larger force at play — climate change, which is making storms more intense and sea levels higher, accelerating the erosion of beach fronts.

Rodanthe, home to about 200 people, has lost seven homes to the ocean in the past four years. The house that was destroyed on Friday was unoccupied at the time of the collapse. There have been no reports of injuries from any of the seven collapses, according to the National Park Service.

Officials warned that many more homes are at risk for damage or collapse in the coming days as Hurricane Ernesto pummels the East Coast from afar, even as it follows a path that is not expected to hit the mainland United States. Some other homes near Rodanthe have already appeared to sustain damage.

Forecasters predict that the storm could bring dangerous rip currents and a high surf along the East Coast through the weekend. The risks could persist in the Outer Banks through early next week, they said.

In North Carolina, climate change has caused the sea level to rise by about half a foot since 2000, and the level could rise by about another foot by 2050, said William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He added that the amount of sea-level rise in North Carolina is comparable to other nearby states. But the Outer Banks, a low-lying barrier island and a popular vacation destination, is particularly vulnerable to rising waters because it faces rougher waters and is built on shifting sand, Mr. Sweet said.

Rodanthe, located on Hatteras Island, is home to many oceanfront properties with elevated houses sitting on pilings that were once surrounded by dunes and dry sand. Now, that land is often partially or fully covered by water, which erodes the sand around the pilings that support the homes, creating the risk of a collapse.

That was the case with the home on Friday, officials said.

“The pilings were washed out from under it,” said Robert Outten, the manager of Dare County, which includes Rodanthe, describing a video he had seen of the collapse. “The house just sat down in the surf and floated off.”

Officials said that residents facing the threat of home collapse have limited — and largely unappealing — options.

They can move their home to drier ground, a costly and logistically complicated process that is not always feasible. They can pay to have their home demolished. Or, they can wait until the home collapses and then seek reimbursement through insurance, if covered.

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a 70-mile stretch of shoreline that includes the beach in front of Rodanthe, recently began a pilot program where it purchased and demolished two threatened oceanfront properties, according to David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina. Those homes were the only ones in the program, and the owners were paid fair market value, he said. Many other homeowners were interested in participating, but there were not enough funds to expand the program, Mr. Hallac said.

Along with endangering homeowners, a collapsed house can also pose significant risks to both beachgoers and the local ecosystem, according to Mr. Hallac.

He said debris from a collapsed structure can spread for miles, especially when there are powerful waves, which can break homes into tens of thousands of pieces. Following Friday’s collapse, the National Park Service has urged visitors to avoid the beaches and stay out of the water in Rodanthe.

At the county level, officials in some communities have tried to replenish the sand along the beach. However, Mr. Outten said that such a process has not yet been carried out in Rodanthe because of funding constraints, estimating that it could cost tens of millions of dollars.

“The fact that a house fell isn’t surprising to anyone,” he said. “Our problem is that we don’t have any easy solutions for it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/north-carolina-house-collapse-ernesto.html?searchResultPosition=1

Solving Problems With Susan Solomon

She played a crucial role in fixing the ozone hole, and has thoughts on climate change.

By Cara Buckley, The New York Times, July 18, 2024

It’s been an especially intense week, with election-related stress and political divisiveness only increasing. So, it seemed like a good time to hear from someone who has demonstrated how people can come together to fix huge problems and who has also played a crucial role in helping remediate a global threat.

In the 1980s, the groundbreaking atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon pioneered our understanding that the then-gaping hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was caused by industrial chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. A damaged ozone layer increases ultraviolet radiation on Earth, harming humans, ecosystems, plants and animals. Dr. Solomon’s work underpins the Montreal Protocol, which banned 99 percent of ozone-depleting substances. Ratified by every country on the planet, the agreement is reversing the harms done to the ozone layer and is considered one of the most successful environmental treaties in history.

In her latest book, “Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do it Again,” which was published last month, Dr. Solomon, who teaches at M.I.T., argues that we can learn from past environmental fights. Public awareness and consumer pressure can influence lawmakers, she says, and lead to positive change.

Here are excerpts from our interview, edited and condensed for clarity.

Why this book and why now?

People need to have some hope. We imagine that we never solve anything, that we have all these horrific problems and they’re just getting worse and worse and worse. I’m not going to say we don’t have any problems. We do. But it’s really important to go back and look at how much we succeeded in the past and what are the common threads of those successes.

The chemical companies’ pushback to reining in CFCs is arguably minimal compared to resistance from oil and gas companies to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And the ozone issue didn’t have quite the same fervent political and polarized dissent from the public around it. Are these apples and apples comparisons?

No doubt, climate change is probably the heaviest lift we’ve ever attempted, just because energy is so embedded in the economy. Countries that use more fossil fuel energy are generally richer. There’s almost a linear relationship between how much you emit and how rich you are.

The key thing is how much technologies have changed. It follows from public opinion. It follows from the extent to which the public is actually demanding it. Sixty percent of the American public believes the climate is changing and that it’s caused mainly by human activities, according to current polls. I would argue the paralysis hasn’t been as bad as people think it has been. And with CFCs, the companies actually did resist quite a bit.

I recognize that there were ozone wars. But it was a smaller market and they could shift to other chemicals. This seems bigger and a bit scarier.

I think the smog issue was a better analog. In 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed, the auto industry was one of the most profitable industries in the United States. They did not want to change. They pushed back like crazy. But there was a massive amount of popular will. There was therefore bipartisan support. Ultimately, it happened because of popular support and clever technology forcing policies that could flow from that support.

The Supreme Court recently threw out the Chevron deference, which will almost certainly weaken or eliminate limits on water and air pollution, toxic chemical regulations, and policies that tackle climate change. So, how do we square that with the idea of hope for the planet?

I am scared about Chevron and was pretty appalled by that decision. It remains to be seen how much it’s really going to affect things, because if it moves forward the way the worst projections are suggesting, it will completely paralyze the courts. And that’s not viable, either.

At that point, I think Congress will have to go back and create a new law that will modify some form of Chevron. So to me, the only question is, how long is that going to take? My gut feeling is it won’t be very long. It depends on your definition of long.

I think fortunately, in a way, the globalization of economies is going to continue to put pressure on America to meet standards in other parts of the world.

Despite an increase in renewable energy, the world is not decreasing overall fossil fuel use. We’re just using ever more energy, including now with A.I. And countries very understandably want to have this lovely developed world existence. Could it be that humans are just insatiable for energy?

When it comes to building a power plant today, in almost any country in the world, solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels. There’s no reason to be building more fossil fuel powered power plants except that that’s what the utilities know how to do.

The real need is in the developing countries. Those are the countries where they have to be building a lot more power plants and other things in order to develop. That’s where the development needs to occur in a clean manner. If that doesn’t happen, we are in deep trouble.

You said in the book that without the right governmental structure, it’s hard to get things done. We’re looking at the prospect of a second Trump presidency, and he pulled the U.S., historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, out of the Paris accord. Do you think the technological and economic genies are out of the bottle in terms of embracing green energy, or do you think that a second Trump term could do permanent or semi-permanent damage?

How do you stop the growth of renewable power plants if they’re cheaper than fossil fuels? I’m not saying we should be sanguine. I am saying sound the alarm. Get going. Do what you need to do. Form groups. Help to create the popular will that’s going to propel this issue to where it needs to be. Sure, he may very well pull us out of the Paris Agreement again. He did it before. Did that really slow things down all that much?

The Paris Agreement is written in a clever way. It actually takes about four years after you say you’re going to pull out before you can actually do all the things that you have to do to pull out. Biden put us right back in. So we were out for like, two or three months. I’m not saying that that will have no effect. Whether or not we have a little bit of a hiatus for four years, yes, that would hurt, and climate policy would definitely be slowed down. But it’s not going to be the end of the world.

Your book is called “Solvable.” We have the data scientist Hannah Ritchie, who wrote “Not the End of the World.” We have the marine biologist, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, whose books include “All We Can Save.” And we have the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe highlighting solutions. I don’t want to be gender essentialist, but do you think there’s something there? When I think of the scariest books about climate change, they tend to have been written by men, to be frank.

I think women are actually pretty good problem solvers. So in all of those cases, they’re thinking about how this thing can actually end up being solved. But as a scientist, I have to say we’re dealing with a small number of statistics here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/climate/susan-solomon-q-and-a.html